Elden Ring and Dark Souls series creator Hidetaka Miyazaki is one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people for 2023. It’s a great recognition for the game designer and CEO of Japanese developer FromSoftware, and it comes with glowing praise from another equally famous creative: Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, known for Uncharted and The Last of Us.
On Time Magazine’s page dedicated to Hidetaka Miyazaki, Druckmann recalls his first time playing one of his colleague’s games. Like most players, he kept dying and dying until he slowed down and took a more tactical approach, which also enabled him to really soak in all of the game’s details and features. Druckmann goes on to say that the uncompromising approach spearheaded by games like Elden Ring and Dark Souls allows players to feel intelligent and satisfied when they overcome the challenges thrown at them since they have to figure them out on their own. He also said Miyazaki’s games exemplify how the interactive medium can provide feelings that passive mediums like TV could never replicate.
Miyazaki began his long career working on the Armored Core series (which will finally get another installment, Fires of Rubicon, soon). However, his first masterpiece was Demon’s Souls, the PlayStation 3 exclusive that eventually became a cult hit and spawned the whole Soulslike genre. Dark Souls brought it to multiple platforms and made it mainstream, though Miyazaki then directed another Soulslike game made only for PlayStation consoles, the beloved Bloodborne.
Miyazaki-san also attempted to do something different with Déraciné, a first-person adventure game made exclusively for PlayStation VR, before going back to action games with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, though this game differed from the Souls series due to having fewer RPG elements, no multiplayer, and a greater focus on the narrative that follows the revenge of the shinobi called Wolf.
It was with Elden Ring that he and FromSoftware found their greatest success yet, though. Miyazaki decided to partner with world-renowned fantasy author G. R. R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire) to create the lore of this new intellectual property while the development team realized their first full-fledged open world. The result is a game that received countless perfect scores and won innumerable awards. It also sold over 20 million copies in its first year, and all those fans are now eagerly awaiting the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion. Meanwhile, FromSoftware released the ray tracing update, though PC owners with a GeForce RTX GPU will want to use it with the DLSS mod to get smooth frame rates.
